The annual conference, held at the Ada Byron King Building at
Nottingham Trent University, has become a byword for scholarly and
convivial gatherings in the UK for Byronists and Romanticists over
the last nine years. This year was no exception, and the
conference, on ‘Aspects of Don Juan’, was a
stimulating event, though not untinged with sadness. The organiser,
Peter Cochran, a leading figure in Byron studies and organiser of
the conference, has decided to bow out of Byron studies by the end
of 2013. His presence will be greatly missed, though he will assist
Mirka Horova, the new conference organiser, who has kindly agreed
to step into the breach in his absence. The conference was a
tribute to Peter: talks were as enjoyable as they were
thought-provoking with each speaker rising to the occasion.

In the opening plenary session, chaired by Ken Purslow (Newstead
Byron Society), Peter Cochran (Newstead Abbey) bowed out in
typically impressive style with a talk entitled ‘Don
Juan and Tradition or, Little Juan’s Potty’ which sought to
provide a definitive outline of the European and English literary
traditions with which Don Juan ‘plays so many
different games’. After a brief discussion of the debt to Homer and
the Italian mock-epic tradition, he focused on Don Juan’s more
immediate predecessors. These included Rabelais’s Gargantua
and Pantagruel, with which Byron shares many satirical
targets, and Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, an inspiration
for Byron’s ‘merry attitude to religion’. Byron was also influenced
by the sceptical spirit of Montaigne’s essays, as well as his
eschewal of system and openness to all experience. In Cervantes’s
Don Quixote, Byron had seen a character whose life
often reads as if it were literature. Cochran drew detailed
parallels between Don Juan and the works of Sterne,
Smollett and Fielding.

After coffee, the conference split into two groups. Session 1A
was chaired by Mirka Horova (Charles, Prague), Session 1B by Anna
Camilleri (Oxford).

Diego Saglia (Parma) began 1A with ‘“Don Alfonso” and the
Theatrical Matrix of Don Juan’ which explained the
theatrical influences on Byron as he composed Don
Juan. The ‘theatrical matrix’ was much wider than the London
stage familiar to Byron and his British readers. It was an
intersection of theatrical experiences in various Italian towns
such as Milan, Vicenza, Venice and Lucca as well as such concepts
as theatricality and ‘self-spectacularisation’, but also involved
Byron’s own dramatic works, theatrical sources and fragments that
may have inspired the poet. A key part of this matrix, which Saglia
examined in detail, was Byron’s unwritten play ‘Don Alfonso’, which
he described as a ‘powerful counter-text’ to Don Juan.
Saglia drew attention to the ‘highly peculiar network’ that exists
between Don Juan and ‘Don Alfonso’: both share
similarities in plot, a ‘Byronic’ hero, sexual intrigue, mystery,
existentialism, a Spanish component, and dramatic, gothic and
Faustian modes. Saglia suggested ‘Don Alfonso’ could be interpreted
as a double of Don Juan: a speculative ‘evil twin’,
‘the road not taken’ and a ‘closing down of textual possibilities’.
Itsuyo Higashinaka (Ryukoku) followed with ‘Don Juan’s
comic rhymes’, an entertaining excursus of Byron’s ‘careful and
intentional’ rhyming scheme. Also referring to Swift, Pope and
Frere, he paid special attention to the two rhymes in the first six
lines of the ottava rima. Higashinaka explained that
Byron seems particularly inclined to manipulate proper nouns,
whether these are personal names, fictitious or real, ancient or
modern, foreign or British. This manipulation of rhymes indicates
an authentic love for foreign languages as well as an attitude to
play with words and phrases from different languages. This morning
session ended with Nataliya Solovyova’s (Lomonosov State, Moscow)
‘Don Juan and Russia’, which touched on aspects of the
double-context of ‘Byron and Russia’ and ‘Russia and Byron’, and
concluded that ‘the Russian background of Don Juan was
intricate and controversial’. Solovyova mentioned that an
understanding of Russian diplomacy in Italy and Switzerland was
critical for understanding the poem.

Parallel session 1B offered three papers ranging from
consistency, to influence, and finally, to appetite. The first
paper was given by leading Byronist, Bernard Beatty (Liverpool and
St Andrews), which was titled...

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